The Story Behind The "Pizza Saver"

So That's Where The Little Piece Of Plastic On Your Pizza Came From

You know that little piece of plastic that comes on top of your delivery pizza? It may look like a miniature three-legged table fit for a doll, but this tiny apparatus actually serves an important role in keeping your pie intact. The official name of this device is the "pizza saver," as The Huffington Post notes, which is appropriate, because it's been saving our pizzas since its invention back in 1985.

In the early 1980s, a Long Island woman named Carmela Vitale noticed that pizzas she ordered from delivery places often arrived with the toppings all screwed up. She realized that this unfortunate pattern was caused by sagging pizza box lids sticking to her pies' cheesy tops. Like any New Yorker, Vitale didn't take well to her pizza being messed with, so she set out to find a remedy to this problem. According to Gizmodo, Vitale came up with the design for what she originally called the “package saver.” It was a small plastic tripod that is placed in the middle of a pizza to support the box lid above. She filed patent #4,498,586 on February 10, 1983, and it was granted two years later.

The design is, of course, genius. It saves pizzas from ruin and is cheap to manufacture — less than a cent a piece, as Eater reports. Clearly, we all owe Carmela Vitale a huge thank you for keeping our pizzas safe and sound on their journies to our mouths.